Izak was on a major national TV show (just for a few seconds, and nothing to do with our website, but way cool!)

Making our First Dollar

It’s a pretty exciting time when you make your first bit of money online, you start to see the possibilities and get confirmation that, yes, this really is possible.

Now, I know AU$66 isn’t a lot to get excited about, but it’s the first step, and it’s a scalable step.

That money came from someone clicking on our web hosting affiliate link and signing up for a $5 a month hosting account with A Small Orange. Each day our website is online, will give someone else a chance to click on that same link and earn us another $66. Every article we post will give us higher visibility to get more people viewing our content. Every post we make on social media will also increase that visibility and bring more people to the site.

It’s a numbers game, and the only way to win at that game is to take things one small step at a time – in our case, 14 days at a time – and before you know it, those little actions will start to build up and become EPIC.

Here’s a little pic for posterity!

Izak is a TV Star!

Ok… maybe staris overstating it a bit, but he did make a (brief) appearance on the TV show The Voice (Australia) this week.

Team Ricky spent the day filming at his school earlier in the week as part of a promotion for the Woolworths Earn and Learn fundraiser that provides sporting equipment and music equipment to local schools. With Izak being school captain, he was heavily involved with all the filming, got to meet and hang out with all the contestants from Team Ricky and brief little bit of footage on the actual TV show.

Here’s a photo of Izak and Team Ricky… hopefully one of them will go on to win the competition and become really famous, wouldn’t that be cool 🙂

…and the extended footage of the visit has heaps of Izak on there (and my other son, Luke, and my wife Juleigh. You can watch it here: http://s.9jump.in/EW4hUxh

Pretty cool hey!

What else happened in the last 14 days?

Well, if all that wasn’t EPIC enough, we ticked off a few other bits and pieces too.

Izak was away for a week at school camp, they went to Emu Gully and had an awesome time sleeping in tents, cooking their own food, hiking, boating, riding around on 4wd-quads and a big flour bomb fight against the teachers to finish it off… he got home, played two games of soccer the next day and basically slept for the rest of the weekend!

About the only thing we’re doing at the moment is a little affiliate marketing… but we’re not really focusing on making money at all right now, just feeling our way through providing value and inspiration to people as we start to build our presence and build an audience (which is why it’s such a cool thing to make anything at all after only two and a half weeks).

What worked and what didn’t?

Traffic has continued along the trend that we saw towards the end of launch week, it’s stayed pretty steady at about 10 visitors a day, but the bounce rate has been really low (0 most days) and everyone seems to be sticking around and reading 3-4 pages which is great… we’ve also made 5 new email subscribers in the last week (only had 2 launch week), so that’s encouraging, but we still need to look into that and make it a bit more appealing I think.

What’s happening in the next 14 days?

#1 on our listis to see if we can ride the social media wave tapping into The Voice, for the next few weeks.

We’ve done up a new landing page and tweaked our 2-minute guide to setting up your first website to be a little more focused on creating a fan-site for your favourite singers (like Team Ricky!), and we’ll tag our behind the scene photos with the show and team Ricky performers on twitter.

We’ll see whether we can a) attract much in the way of traffic at all, and b) whether that traffic sticks around and reads as much of our content as everyone else seems to be doing, or whether they just come looking for photos and run away… whatever happens, it should be a good little marketing lesson – going after a specific market segment and analysing what that traffic does. I guess we’ll see!

The second thing I want to do during this next 14 day cycle is to start researching some other markets we can go after. I’ve got a bit of a plan to setup a few sites that just have a landing page, offer something free as a gift for signing up to a newsletter, promote an affiliate offer within the email list, and drive traffic purely via social media… if we get a few of those up and running, we can start to validate how easy it is to get traffic to those niches, how that traffic responds to different offers and whether they’re keen to pay for stuff.

Once we see a site start to take off, we can look at putting a bit more effort into it and building it out to offer even more.

Thanks

To finish off, I just want to say thanks again for everyone who has read out blog, favourited our tweets, signed up to our newsletter and found a bit of value in what we’re doing. Even though this is a project that Izak and I are doing together, it’s not just for us… we’re putting everything out there and being as transparent and honest as we can because we want people like you to get inspired and come along on this journey as well.

Everything we are doing here is super simple, and I want to break down as many barriers as I can to give as many people a chance to express their voice and earn some money while doing something they enjoy.

…and if you do get inspired – make sure you tell me about it! Post a comment, send me an email, tweet me on Twitter… the more we get to hear, the more Izak and I get inspired too, I want to see everyone succeed.

Don't forget to join the Epic14Days Newsletter and get Two FREE GUIDES: [step by step] How to create your first ever website [for free] in less than 2 minutes, and; 5 things you can do in the next 14 days to start you on your way to becoming an EPIC online superhero.

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